When we started to work with ionic, we quickly realized that the ./www folder quickly started to contain files that had no business being in the packaged app. We also wanted to add some additional features to the build process that are not present today. Namely eliminating unnecessary changes to the git repo.

These changes have lead to our ./www folder going from 55.6MB down to 3.8MB, and the packaged app gone from 12.49MB to 2,77MB!

ähhm i only saying the buzzwords: grunt or gulp
-> create a task to copy all really used files in a build dir and then you can trigger also the build process via grunt exec oder grunt shell extensions or minify all js files before… and so on

All these tasks gets processed when you run ionic build
I also run cordova-deploy to easily deploy my apps to Hockeyapp, and the tasks get’s run then as well. So there is no need to add grunt as a secondary task manager.